Holy shit.
Exam time is finally here.
Shit. Shit. Shit. I’m not prepared!
This was usually my line of thought every single damn time we had an exam week roll around. Again, reviews are going to be your best friend before the exams.
I mean, I feel like I’ve written a bunch on the reviews for tests in previous posts already, but I will give it one more go for ya’ll just so you don’t have to hunt.
Exam Time:
KCU uses the app called Examplify. Pretty much the night before you take your exam, you are able to download it. You get an email telling you the time that it is available to download and other specifics about what time to arrive the next morning and what is allowed/not allowed. It doesn’t ever change (the information in the email other than the day and the test you are taking) so you don’t have to worry about things changing on you. You should download you exam that night. If not, you need to make sure you get there early enough to download it. Too many classmates would wait until right before they took the test and then the app would crash or their exam wouldn’t download.
So don’t do that.
Exams for my class would start at 9AM sharp. We would need to be in our seats by 8:50AM and have the exam up and ready.
Ipads had to be locked into the program, with wifi turned off and on airplane mode. Once everyone was seated, a code/password would be displayed on the screen. After you type this in, hit the accept button for a few prompts (which includes that your program will self lock and you cannot exit unless you hit the exit button), add another password, and then you start! If you try to get out of the program (like to look something up) and then get back in you will automatically fail as they will assume you were cheating.
It’s confusing the first one or two times but after that it’s pretty straightforward. They will give you a quick once over during orientation so you can see it. But I guarantee you’ll forget how to use the app once the first test week rolls around (because I sure as hell did).
Tests were usually anywhere between 45-65ish questions. See the post about the Inside Guide to Your Professors* for the specifics of how they test. Biochem and molecular would usually pull 5 questions per lecture to test on, but this was not, I repeat not a steadfast rule.
There is a countdown on the top bar so you know how long you have left in your test. There is also a calculator, a flag, and some other tools on the right hand side should you need it as you cannot leave the app during your test. Below is a snapshot of a sample test in the program. In the real test, over by where the submit & exit button is in the photo is where your countdown timer is. The submit & exit appears after you have answered all of the questions. You must submit and upload your exam before you can exit the application and leave the test (or they count this as cheating if you try to leave the application in a different format).
If you have time, I suggest you go back and check your answers at least once. If not for the content, to make sure you picked the answer that you originally intended. My first test week the program glitched and got super touchy, and answers that I know I didn’t choose ended up being my final answer because I touched the wrong part of the screen. Subsequently, it counted it as a different answer. Since I didn’t check, I got the answer wrong.
Learn from my mistakes and double check your work.
Reviews:
For Dr. Zaidi & Dr. Agbas: They each have a review session that they give before each test block that they teach in. They both have a giant slide set that will have all of their slides from all their lectures in it, or will have most of the slides from all of their lectures. This means that you will have a slide set anywhere from 100-200+ slides. This is why in the previous post I mentioned above, you do not leave their information until the last second. Every thing they teach is fair game for a question to be pulled from, so you need to know it all.
Dr. White: He will have a slide set as well, but usually his slides are off of the main topics/high yield topics that he has at the end of his lectures. So the way his lectures are set up are all his normal slides, and then at the very end he will have condensed slides or example topics that he pulls for (most, not all) test questions. Sometimes he uses the slides that he puts for the condensed version at the end of his lectures in the review, other times he pulls the original slides for his reviews. These can also tend to be long, but that is usually because there is only a few sentences per slide. His stuff also during my year tended to be the last few lectures before test time, so they were pretty fresh in my brain at that point.
Dr. Kincaid: Again, if she gives a review, go to the review. She will usually point you to the topics of what you need to directly know and will tell you the topics of the essays/short answers. She does like very specific detail and can ask several questions that are detailed oriented, so her reviews help point to a chunk of the detail she is specifically interested in. She does not always give a review though.
Dr. Anderson: I’ve stated this one enough; go to his reviews. He will narrow down the topics and give you what you need to know for 90-95% of the test. He will usually only throw 1-2 questions on there that you haven’t seen before to see how well you actually studied outside of his reviews. Typically for him, his reviews obviously gave me majority of the answers, but I would study based off the posted review he gave us so I knew the information inside and out no matter which way he asked it. Because even if he uses the same topic/question, he will word a few of them differently which means the answer is different. But if you study based off the learning objectives/reviews he gives instead of just memorizing the straight question, you will understand the concept better and answer any question he throws you based off that topic.
Dr. Segars: He will try to give a review. If he is able to, he will set aside one class period to go over the main topics we learned. If not, he will end a class partially early and use the rest of the time to go over the review. You do have a solid review with questions in tutoring though.
Dr. Shnyra: He can give a review, but usually the review/questions in tutoring were more helpful for me. Also the questions sets he sends us himself are the most helpful (compared to the in class review, unless he is going over why the answer is correct on his question stem), as you can figure out how he writes his test questions.
Good luck studying and kick some ass this year! Let me know if you found this information helpful down in the comments below and what you would like to see next.